Meet the Couple Who Met on Everest and Just Speed-Climbed the World’s Sixth-Tallest Peak

“You could see why no one is summiting today,” Adrian Ballinger says on his Snapchat account EverestNoFilter. He zooms towards the peak of Cho Oyu in the distance. Blustering winds knock the snow off the summit so violently that it blends in with the clouds beside it. It’s the sixth-tallest mountain in the world, straddling the borders of China and Nepal, and Ballinger is waiting to race to its peak with his girlfriend and climbing partner, Emily Harrington.

Ballinger is a certified AMGA/IFMGA mountain guide, Eddie Bauer guide, the first American to have completed two ski descents of 8,000-meter peaks, and six-time Everest summiter best known for Snapchatting his summit attempt with no oxygen this year. Everest was where, in 2012, he met Harrington, a five-time Sport Climbing National Champion and Everest summiter who has ascended outdoor routes rated 5.14—an extremely high level of difficulty (the Yosemite Decimal System scale tops out at 5.15).

A day later, though, Ballinger and Harrington are safely at advanced basecamp on Cho Oyu at roughly 18,400 feet, having successfully summited just hours earlier. Despite the daunting conditions, they reached the summit in just nine days. It’s a trip that takes the average climber two months. This speed-climb is a feat the couple has been preparing for for six weeks—the latest challenge for a duo who have climbed a particularly challenging route called Golden Gate on Yosemite’s El Capitan together and attempted to climb Makalu together in September 2015, but were turned back due to deep snow.

For an hour, they enjoyed the sprawling plateau boasting stunning views of snowy Mount Everest from the peak of Cho Oyu. But nearly 27,000 feet above sea level isn’t an opportune place to let your guard down. “The whole celebration really comes when you’re back at basecamp,” Ballinger says.

We caught up with the couple via satellite phone at advanced basecamp before they began the rest of their descent.

Tell us how you met.Adrian Ballinger: Believe it or not, at 21,000 feet at Camp 2 on Mount Everest. I was guiding a group for my fifth season on the mountain. Em was part of The North Face team expedition led by Conrad Anker. I went to have coffee in Conrad's dining tent—I have a sweet handheld espresso machine I bring everywhere—saw Em there and gave her the first shot! That got us talking and we’ve never looked back.

Emily Harrington: I returned home from Everest that year to my hometown of Boulder and booked a one-way ticket to visit Adrian in Tahoe. We spent three weeks together before I flew back to Colorado, packed my Subaru, and drove out to California. I've been there ever since. Thinking back on it, it seems pretty out of character for me. I suppose I just had this weird confidence that we had something special and it was going to work out.

What was your first reaction when you summited Cho Oyu together?

EH: It was pretty amazing because usually on the peak it’s cold and windy and kind of harsh but when we got there it was super sunny with zero wind. You could have been in a T-shirt it was so warm. We were just enjoying it.

AB: Take away the fact that we did it in nine days, it was just so cathartic to stand on top together and know it all went perfectly. Emily was having anxiety about the way down. The cliché is that the summit is halfway there.

EH: Yeah, you’re never going to be jumping up and down on the way up or doing CrossFit at 8,000 feet in the air. It’s hard to even explain how difficult it is to ski down.

EH: We enjoy doing challenging things together. I mean, that was sort of our beginning, so it makes sense. We have different skills and strengths and so we can learn a lot from one another. Adrian’s the most organized and logistically talented person I've ever met. That combined with his huge amount of experience in the Himalaya has made the trip super smooth. I’m a total perfectionist as well, but these types of trips are incredibly complicated logistically and it can be easy to miss a detail or forget to do something and then the whole thing comes unraveled. With Adrian that stuff just doesn’t happen.

AB: Training for this together was awesome. Everest this past spring was really challenging for our relationship. It was all-encompassing before, during, and after, and we got the idea for this trip from that experience. Instead of another over-two-month Himalayan saga, we tried to distill the climb down to less than two weeks using all of our athletic ability, logistical expertise, and modern technology, like pre-acclimatization tents and detailed weather models. We’ve been laughing and playing throughout this climb thus far.

What was your strategy for condensing the climb?

EH: Basically Himalayan peaks have been climbed in the same fashion since the first successful ascents that took place in the ’50s. That means multiple weeks or months, and many rotations up and down the mountain to acclimatize. The goal is to build red blood cells that allow you to continue higher without getting sick, since these incredibly long expeditions tax you mentally and physically.

But now we have all of this technology that can help shorten that time. There’s better weather forecasting, improved training theory, and even ways to pre-acclimatize at home before arriving at the mountain. Our strategy involved training at home, pre-acclimatizing in these altitude-simulator tents called hypoxic tents, having all of our logistics and organization in place on the mountain before we arrived—camps set, permits in place, transport, etc.—and waiting for a good weather forecast before we even left home. That way we stayed healthier by staying home, eating and resting well, and blasting when the time was right.

Living for months in a little yellow tent at or above 18,000 feet may sound super adventurous to those who haven’t done it before, but it can get pretty isolating and you develop a sort of cabin fever after a while. It’s also actually pretty terrible for your health, and you return home weak and “skinny-fat” since the altitude eats all of your muscle and leaves the fat for warmth and protection. Being a rock climber who loves to push myself on more physically challenging terrain most of the year means long Himalayan expeditions have essentially crippled my climbing strength for up to six months, before. I’m hoping this trip won’t do as much damage and I can return home and keep climbing with some remnant of the strength I had before.

AB: Wow, Em just nailed it. I’ve spent seven to eight months a year living in yellow tents on expeditions around the world since 1997. I’ve loved the epic, meaning: long expeditions. But now I want to use all I’ve learned to shorten Himalayan expeditions to a more manageable length.

We’ve been offering a form of these rapid ascent expeditions through my climbing company Alpenglow Expeditions for five years now, shortening all of our climbs by 30 to 50 percent with improved success and safety throughout. Em’s and my attempt to climb the world’s sixth-tallest peak in less than two weeks door-to-door is the ultimate expression of this rapid ascent system.

How did you manage your time on this climb?

EH: We were just moving, with a couple rest days. Rest days are actually super hard for me because you’re stuck in a tent the entire time with nothing to do but think. You’re stewing over everything, re-thinking things, wondering if it’s all going to work out.

AB: There were only four actual climb days, which is wild to think about. The first three were four- to seven-hour climbs. We had support from sherpa and my climbing company. But we were still carrying a huge amount of personal gear on us. Each day was brutal, but we knew we only had to perform at a really high level for four days.

EH: The biggest issue was the short weather window we had to summit and make it all work. The weather graphs were showing clouds and precipitation the afternoon we planned to summit. That doesn’t only make for really hard conditions to climb in but it can produce unstable snow conditions and avalanche hazards.

I was initially worried about our acclimatization and that maybe we wouldn’t be ready to come so high so quickly. As far as we know, not many people have gone from 6,200 feet to sleeping above 21,000 feet in only a week. But the pre-acclimatization seems to have worked because we feel totally fine. In some ways I feel better than I have at altitude on past trips.

AB: At this point we’ve proven our logistics and pre-acclimatization work. We got to base camp in an unprecedented four days. And in only a week we were sleeping at over 21,00 feet and felt strong. So the challenge for us was much like a traditional season. We saw only two possible summit days when winds would be low enough to safely stand on top and there wouldn’t be much snowfall. But the first day was too crowded for my liking with up to 100 climbers attempting the summit, and the second day might have gotten stormy too early to allow a summit. So we had to pick the best of bad options and try to make it work. These decisions are part of what I thrive on. I love the challenge of making really serious decisions with potentially big consequences under pressure and without a crystal ball.

AB: Wow, so much of what we do is bizarre, like pooping in bags and carrying all human waste off the mountain; spending six nights with Em on a six-by-four-foot ledge as we ascended a route on El Capitan in Yosemite; stepping over the bodies of climbers killed high on Everest, where carrying a body down is often impossible; and the second time I met Emily, which was back down in Everest Base Camp at about 18,000 feet, she was crowd-surfing after jumping off a makeshift bar at a massive international party of climbers celebrating finishing their high-altitude rotations.

EH: That was the first and only time I've ever crowd-surfed. Climbing is such an incredibly diverse and complicated sport. It can mean anything from hiring a local fisherman to take you out to some limestone pillars in the ocean off the coast of Thailand where you climb up as high as you're comfortable and jump off into the water. It can also be festering on a knife-edge ridge at 18,000 feet in a tent for four days waiting for the wind to calm down because you feel like at any second you will be ripped from the ground and sent flying. Every second you're wishing you were anywhere else but there. I've done both of those things and regretted neither.

I once walked for 125 miles through the Burmese jungle in Myanmar to reach this isolated peak on the border of Tibet. It was the most remote and isolated place I've ever been to. There were loads of snakes and crazy spiders and the people were really nice but I think super confused by what we were trying to do. We tried to climb the mountain but ultimately failed due to exhaustion and lack of food. We then had to walk back out 125 miles with an inconceivably small amount of food.

What advice do you have for couples looking to try extreme sports together?

AB: Take time to build experience together and individually and learn from professionals. Extreme sports are called extreme because they include risk. Learning to manage this risk as an individual and a unit is essential. And learning from pros makes the process much safer.

EH: Be okay with the fact that it won’t always be easy. Relationships are hard as it is, and adding stress and danger can exacerbate tension that inevitably arises. It can also be a good thing and a lesson in communication and in learning from one another. I think for us it’s helped us understand one another better and be more open and supportive. Or something relationship-y like that.